He lays out the details, which you'll need since the paper is pay-per-view.

Ferdinand and Isabella receive captive Guanches

These results present a bit of a dilemma for conventional wisdom. Not only are these 61 individuals before the Spanish missions, the Punta Azul individuals are nearly maternally fixed H1-16260. It also appears that haplogroup R1b is native to El Hierro, or at least predates Hispanization. Of course there are also the expected, typical Berber haplogroups. (once again we see a strong relationship between R1b and H1)

No evidence yet suggests habitation before the European Early Bronze Age and the last major immigration event would have been pre-historic Berbers. Between the Berber influx and the Colonial Period, the islands were sometimes visited by maritime powers, but the islands were home to people with relatively little contact between each other or the outside world.

So this leaves several possibilities as to how and when the ancestry of the cave people of El Heirro formed. One is that Punic, Greek or Roman settlers or merchants left a paternal mark on the natives and that this was specifically the introduction of R1b-M269 in the largest part. There could also be unrecorded contact between Medieval Spain and the islands. That's a difficult case to make.

A second possibility is that the presence of R1b among North African Atlas Berbers was at one time much more pronounced than it is now and is reflected in the founding Berber population of the islands. That's a good possibility.

More conservative potteries with geometries and solar motifs [via Gevic]

A third possibility, and in keeping with the autosomal results and diversity of male lines, is that the islands were already inhabited before the Berber influx and was also genetically monolithic and Atlantic-like, something like if Ireland was invaded by Berbers. It's important to remember the time-frame in which the islands were first populated in a meaningful way (sometime in the 2nd millennium) and also where they are in relation to Western Morocco.

These three possibilities are not exclusive. The really big news is that this has implications for how modern uni-parental markers of the contemporary inhabitants are viewed. Maybe this will encourage Canary men to get the full y-chromosome tested.

Y-chromosome results show the presence of three lineages: E-M81, R-M269, and E-M33.

•

Matrilineality could explain the behaviors in maternal and paternal lineages.

Abstract

The
aim of this study was to establish the genetic studies of the
population from one of the most important known aboriginal funerary
spaces of the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands), the Punta Azul cave,
which harbors remains of 127 individuals. Sixty-one adult tibiae were
examined, 32 left and 29 right. Radiocarbon dating yields an antiquity
of 1015–1210 AD. We have obtained an overall success rate of 88.5% for
the molecular sexing, and of 90.16% for the uniparental markers. Short
tandem repeats (STR) profiles were also possible for 45.9% of the
samples. This performance is a consequence of the good conservation of
the bones in their archaeological context. The mtDNA composition of the
sample is characterized by the complete fixation of the H1-16260
lineage. These results can be explained by a mixture of consecutive
founding events, a bottleneck episode at the beginning of the
colonization and/or as a consequence of genetic drift. Paternal lineages
were also affected by these processes but in a less acute way. These
differences lead us to propose social behaviors as an explanation for
this difference. The maternal transmission of the lineages, mentioned in
ethnohistorical sources of the Archipelago, could be an explanation.
These results could be in agreement with endogamous practices, but the
autosomal STR results indicate a relative high diversity. These results
have allowed us to characterize the Punta Azul cave population and see
the way in which geographical isolation, the process of adaptation and
specific social behaviors affected the aboriginal population of the
Island.

So here's a question. Why only daggers and cow heads? A similar phenomenon at Stonehenge; hundreds of engraved daggers, that's it.

Here's one possibility put forth by Michael Bott [here], that is that the daggers are indicative of the activity that took place in this location, perhaps dueling in this location, maybe religious combat sport or venationes. Since this place is kind of a hassle to get to, maybe the activity was sanctioned in the backdrop of a holy mountain. Whatever score settling, trial by combat, dueling or contention was settled once and for all? Anyhow, that seems to jive with Huet's accumulation theory.

Unless you can think of another reason?

New Perspectives on the Chronology and Meaning of Mont Bégo Rock Art (Alpes-Maritimes, France)

AbstractIn 1994, H. de Lumley's teams of researchers finished the colossal task—initiated more than 20 years earlier—of recording every pecked rock engraving of Mont Bégo's rock art. The following year, in the book Le grandiose et le sacré, Lumley defined the site as a sacred mountain and attributed rock engravings, considered as ex-votos, to the Early Bronze Age and the Bell Beaker period. However, it is hard to recognize what interpretations can be directly drawn from the data: some exceptional rock engravings are considered as representative of the whole corpus of rock engravings and the most numerous ones are considered as a ‘bruit de fond’ [background noise]. Furthermore, recognition of associations—where rock engravings are contemporaneous and significantly grouped—had been criticised, and the hypothesis that all the rock engravings can be considered as a single archaeological event seems also to be contradicted by studies of superimpositions. We developed a GIS and a comprehensive database, with statistics, to identify specific spatial configurations, seriation effects and, finally, the evolution of the rock art. By going further in the periodization, our aim is to propose some provisional hypotheses about the meaning of Mont Bégo's rock engravings.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

If the conclusion of this research were to hold, then it would appear that dairying was widely practiced in some areas of the Northern Mediterranean but not others, particularly Northern Greece.

The safe consensus view would be that this is a period of subsistence experimentation and nothing more. That explains the variability of farming and husbandry practices, move on. I'm not so sure. Another wretched pay-per-obscurity.

Abstract

In the absence of any direct
evidence, the relative importance of meat and dairy productions to
Neolithic prehistoric Mediterranean
communities has been extensively debated.
Here, we combine lipid residue analysis of ceramic vessels with
osteo-archaeological
age-at-death analysis from 82 northern
Mediterranean and Near Eastern sites dating from the seventh to fifth
millennia BC
to address this question. The findings
show variable intensities in dairy and nondairy activities in the
Mediterranean region
with the slaughter profiles of
domesticated ruminants mirroring the results of the organic residue
analyses. The finding of
milk residues in very early Neolithic
pottery (seventh millennium BC) from both the east and west of the
region contrasts
with much lower intensities in sites of
northern Greece, where pig bones are present in higher frequencies
compared with other
locations. In this region, the slaughter
profiles of all domesticated ruminants suggest meat production
predominated. Overall,
it appears that milk or the by-products of
milk was an important foodstuff, which may have contributed
significantly to the
spread of these cultural groups by
providing a nourishing and sustainable product for early farming
communities.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Apparently the recreated braggot sucked, which makes sense given the
honey content. Mead tastes like cough syrup, so if you took equal parts
of NyQuil, an amber ale, a couple squirts of almond air freshener and a
couple of peppermints, then you might be close.

Of course, it's easy to screw a recipe up when you have the directions, probably a lot harder when you don't. Mead still sucks.

Theoretically, Saccharomyces could very well be suspended in the interior wax coating of Neolithic and Bronze Age beakers. Even if the wax is not visible to the naked eye, small globules may be present under microscopic examination. If wax is present, Saccharomyces is probably present as well. The real work would be attempting to isolate and reanimate the organisms. There's several things we could learn about five thousand year old beer. The first is the sophistication level of brewing. One way to know this is by actually tasting the beer. The other is through genetic analysis. If multiple strains are present, we might learn about the alcohol content %, the time of year certain strains were used, and what they were used for (mead, barley beer, etc)Chemical analysis will also do one other thing that I've suspected, the presence of oak lactones would mostly prove that log barrels (as I've hypothesized) were used to ferment and store beer instead of clay pottery. (See here)

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Want to find flint? Here's two places to look if it isn't common in your area.

Flint and a chuck of quartz-something

Anytime you go to the bank, hospital, college, botanical garden or city park, always be on the lookout for decorative rock beds or landscaping that incorporates rocks. Attractive river rocks are often trucked in from other places. If rounded limestone or quartzite are present, you might get lucky. I found thousands of enormous, dagger-worthy nodules among other rocks outside a doctor's office.

The easiest way to identify flint is to strike it, and then smell it. If you roll the wheel on a cigarette lighter, that's the smell. Do you get edges when you break it? If you strike it in the dark, you'll get a few sparks. The outside should be 'nodular' and semi-smooth for flint.

Often railroad tracks and highways are ballasted with some variation of limestone and quartzite. Technically speaking, depending on one's interpretation, this would more likely be chert, although is basically the same thing since no one definition separates the two.

If I can get past amateur hour, maybe I'll have some stone arrows worth posting.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

I'll have to rely on a few sentences of a pay-per-view abstract, but one point of interest is highlighted below. If I'm reading correctly, this suggests that a large percentage of arrowheads (probably those from burial) had not been used or retouched.

If this was true, then it might also follow that more perishable parts of the burial also followed this pattern. In other words, there could have been a specific 'burial dress' that included items made for the occasion. Given the work effort in constructing burial monuments and similar findings from daggers, we might imagine that the burial clothing, belts, hats and footwear were both costly in terms of time and resources.

OTOH, it could be these guys walked around displaying daggers and arrows they never used. I doubt it, but who knows.

Despite the large-scale expansion of Bell Beaker phenomenon, there is a
tension between the normative Bell Beaker material culture categories
and their local objectification in the form of real artefacts. Stone
projectile points provide an opportunity to evaluate how much was the
general category of such a point influenced by regional and local
factors. The aim of this paper is to explore shape and size variation of
Central European Bell Beaker projectile points from Moravia (Czech
Republic) to elucidate factors responsible for this variation. The
sample consists of 194 projectile points from 54 Central European Bell
Beaker sites (2500–2300/2200 BC) distributed in Morava River catchment.
The size and shape of projectile points were studied by landmark-based
geometric morphometrics and expressed as shape groups, which have been
assessed in terms of their spatial distribution, raw material, and
reutilization. Although several shape categories of points were
identified, there is a strong degree of uniformity in the research
sample. The dominant shape category (75.4 % of points) was pervasive
across geographic space and was not significantly affected either by raw
material or reutilization. A lower degree of reutilization of points is
interpreted as a consequence of a non-utilitarian role of projectile
points, which represented a critical component of Bell Beaker mortuary
practices.

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